Increasing Diverse Hiring Within the Tech Industry

Diversity is a top priority for many of our tech clients. They are not alone – 71 percent of all companies, regardless of industry, say they want to improve diversity within their companies, yet only 12 percent have reached a level of diversity and inclusion considered “mature.”

Beyond the obvious and unquestionable case for diversity and inclusion, it also makes good business sense. According to a 2018 McKinsey report, companies in the top-quartile for workforce diversity are 33% more likely to financially outperform their less diverse counterparts.

How to Create a Diverse Candidate Pipeline

For many niche roles within tech, companies find it difficult to create a strong pipeline, let alone one that includes gender and ethnicity diversity. But by taking a systematic approach rooted in best practices and personal, it is possible to do both. While each approach varies slightly from client to client, there are always components of the following:

Strategic Sourcing and Candidate Cultivation

• Harness AI and tech tools to discover passive candidates
• Set quality of slate criteria that is inclusive of female and minority ratio
• Use blind resumes when sending to hiring managers

Branding

• Develop an employer brand that authentically showcases diversity and inclusive culture
• Run diversity events on quarterly or biannual basis, e.g. Women in Tech

Strategic Change

• A diverse interview panel for all interviews arranged 
• A diversity sourcer role to proactively interview diverse candidates
• Interview Skills Training with documentation about mitigating bias
• Build connections between schools, organizations, and associations that support and develop diverse candidates (Girls Who Code, AnitaB.org, HBCUs, etc.)
  
  

What Gets Measured, Gets Managed (and Improved)

A critical component of LevelUP’s diversity hiring program is tracking key metrics and setting goals. We work with each client to benchmark demographic data within each tier of their organization (i.e. executive, senior management, mid-management, etc.), and set goals for each of these strata. We then have a roadmap to understand where we need to focus and build pipelines around each. 

As part of our data collection, we track the percentage of diverse candidates at each recruiting stage, including:

• Sourced and Screened
• Interviewed
• Offer Extended
• Hired

By making diversity our way of doing business, meaning it is part of every client recruiting program - we significantly increase the number of diverse hires for our clients.

Within LevelUP’s tech client portfolio in particular, 60 percent of the executive to mid-level hires made over the last 12 months are women and people of color.